The Memory Maker

Published: April 14, 2002

(Page 2 of 3)

June brought to Mr. Kirk's studio beaming graduates clutching new diplomas. During the war, a parade of soldiers, sailors, Wacs and Waves -- many of whom had trained at the Kingsbridge Armory just up the street -- came by for portraits to give their parents before being shipped overseas. Buried under the pictures of ceremonial events are luscious, creamy-limbed women adrift in chiffon -- aspiring actresses, perhaps; thanks to a trick of focusing, their faces and bodies are gauzy as a dream.

As you riffle through these photographs, which have been carefully stored in cartons in Ms. Olsen's Hudson Street row house in Greenwich Village, a long-vanished world leaps into life. You can almost hear the buoyant tarantellas, the cantor's lyric chant. You can almost hear the clink of Champagne flutes. Your fingers long to caress the plush Persian lamb coats. You can almost smell the Shalimar.

THE four-room apartment on East Kingsbridge Road soon housed a family of four; a son, Kirk, was born in 1935, a daughter, Mimi, in 1938. But domestic activities were tucked away in the back bedroom and kitchen, and the remaining two rooms were devoted to the studio. The parents slept there, on a foldout sofa. The children slept in the tiny rear bedroom, in foldout chairs that became beds, and were constantly shushed. A walk-in closet had been converted into a darkroom and retouching area, and in the bathroom, drying negatives hung from a wooden frame above the tub and damp prints dried on a cheesecloth-covered rack.

When customers arrived, Mr. Kirk would wheel over one of his painted backdrops, either the richly colored brocade or the pale, pastoral scene. A family might be grouped in front of the oak plant stand with the claw feet or near the antique library table that now sits in Ms. Olsen's front room.

Once the subjects were arranged, Mr. Kirk would dip into his drawer of props for the perfect accessory: the velvet stole that made possible the off-the-shoulder look (a girl had to be over 16 for that); the bouquets of dried roses and camellias; the prayer book for confirmation and communion pictures; the snap-on bow tie that made every young man look spiffy.

''He never diverged from certain poses or certain props,'' his daughter recalled. ''Babies got a tin rattle to shake. Older children got a red rubber ball, a truck or a doll. Sometimes my doll.''

Sunday, the day the brides came, was a madhouse. The entire wedding party, or two or three, descended in full bridal attire after the ceremony, and everyone had a drink in honor of the occasion. Impressionable little Mimi was in heaven. After the last click of the shutter, the participants and Mr. Kirk headed off to a reception at one of the great Bronx ballrooms or restaurants.

Later, when the place was quieter, Mr. Kirk retreated to his darkroom, where for decades he measured his chemicals using an old-fashioned brass scale fitted with miniature weights, and then to his workbench, to retouch his images and print the best of them. Until the arrival of color photography, he hand-tinted all his pictures, using toothpicks wrapped with wisps of cotton and dabbed in special oil paints, a task his daughter eventually assumed.

''I was more bold,'' said Ms. Olsen, who started helping her father when she was 11. ''Perhaps it was because he was never trained as a painter. He didn't see a lot of color in black and white photos.''

Or maybe, she suggested, the explanation was more complicated. Looking at Mr. Kirk as he bent earnestly over his light box, his slender frame silhouetted by the light streaming in behind his shoulder, a Lucky Strike dangling from his lips, you might not know how troubled a soul he was. As with so many of his countrymen, the demons of his childhood haunted him until his death.

The same horrific past may explain why the refrigerator at 52 East Kingsbridge Road was always bursting with rolled grape leaves, salted black olives, lamb meat pies and other tempting Armenian delicacies. And perhaps why he never switched on a radio when he worked, even as the sounds of Sinatra and doo-wop bounced from nearly every corner of the borough.

''He didn't want to leave his apartment, except for photography jobs,'' his daughter said. ''He'd been wandering for so long alone in his youth. He just wanted a safe place with his little family.''

Yet even a home and family could not keep the nightmares at bay. And so he drank, and by the late 1950's he was drinking heavily. Sometimes he slipped downstairs for a few whiskeys with Vinnie Orotelli, who owned the barbershop next door, but more often he drank alone. Liquor made him aggressive, not physically but verbally, as his family remembered all too well. Afterward, he tumbled into bed and slept it off, only to have the cycle repeat itself the next time the past drew too near.

OF all the milestones preserved in amber in Mr. Kirk's trove of contact sheets, few were more lavish than the 1949 wedding of Betty Kanganis, the daughter of a florist, and Nick Raptis, the nephew of a florist. Their romance was the talk of New York's Greek community, mostly because Betty was really just a child when it began, a sophomore at Walton High School, her Sweet 16 party still a year away.

Her father, George, ran the florist shop on Kingsbridge Road and Jerome Avenue, with his brother, Charlie. Nick, born in America but raised in Greece, worked for a wholesaler in the flower district.